Man’s Winged Conquest Over the Deep

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 400, 14 July 1928, Page 17

Man’s Winged Conquest Over the Deep

Kingsford Smith About to Hop Off for New Zealand .

Written for THE SUN by

L. M. AITKEN.

B

LERIOT Is mad,” people said, when the great air pioneer of France flew 20 miles oversea—between France and England. That was on July

25, 1909. Twenty years have flown by, and Eleriot’s madness has spread among men and among nations. Every day, nowadays, aviators are gambling with

death in long ocean flights, and all the world watches with breathless in terest the hard game between the machines made by man, the perils of the air, and the relentless sea, rolling and waiting always, beneath.

Surely it is man’s most magnificent adventure. Romance shines from every page of the story of his alliance with air to conquer the deep. There is a cold thrill in the thought that in these long flights overseas Death rides ever alongside—that the splutter of a failing engine, or the muttering menace of a storm, may be his voice. And there is exhilaration in the knowledge that there is still such adventure in the world, and men who, for little more than the adventure of the thing, ride against the dangers with a smile, thinking of the air as Henry Hudson thought of the B ®a—that it was made not to divide but to unite the lands. Who have been the pioneers in this conquest?

The war, with its great speeding-up of the development of the airplane, had been over for six months when Mr. Harry Hawker and Commander Mackenzie Grieve, R.N., attempted their flight over the Atlantic. It was nn amazingly audacious effort—the same adventure is still considered a v ery bold one, even in our own day. They flew about 1,200 miles, then sngine trouble forced them to come down near a passing steamer. In that same month, Lieutenant-Com ■nander A. C. Read, in the United States Navy flying-boat N.C.4, successfully completed the first transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to Portugal, by way of the Azores.

Atlantic Vanquished

The following month saw the Atlantic vanquished in a non-stop •tight. Sir John Alcock and Sir Whitten Brown—they were knighted for their feat—gave a glorious chapter to the history of aviation when on June 14, 1919, i n a Vickers-Vimy biplane with Rolls-Royce engines, they flew from Newfoundland to Clifton (West of Ireland) in 15 hours 57 minutes, averaging 118 miles an hour, a s Peed which stands to this day a record in transatlantic flying. Three years went by before the Atlantic was again crossed. It was in March, 1922, that two Portuguese airmen, Commander Cabral and Commander Coutinho, set off from bon for Brazil, making stops at the

Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands. They had to make a forced landing at St. Paul’s Rocks, 500 miles from Brazil. Their seaplane was smashed, and the same fate befell a second machine; but in a third seaplane they reached Pernambuco on June 6. Then in January, 1926, the Spanish aviator Comandante Franco flew 1,500 miles with two other airmen in a Dornier-Wa! flving-boat. from the

Canary Islands to Fernando Noronha Islands (220 miles from the mainland of South America), and on to Pernambuco. The Marchese di Pinedo, in his flight round the Atlantic in February last year, flew in the Savoia flying-boat from the Cape Verde Islands to Fernando Noronha, and on to Pernambuco. The following month saw the Portuguese airman, Lieut-enant-Colonel Sarmento Beires fly from the Bissagos Islands, Portuguese West Africa, to Fernando Noronha (1,450 miles) and on to Brazil.

Lone Lindbergh

May came, and Lindbergh’s famous lone non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The heroic courage of this young airmen, starting alone in his tiny plane across the sea, the triumph of this winged leap of youth above the desolation of the cold Atlantic, have no parallel. The idea of the flight was born while he was an airmail pilot, flying his route through rain and snow and wind and starry night. Long he revolved it in his mind. Others were doing the same. A great French ace had made one forlorn attempt, and announced his plans for another. Byrd, conqueror of the North Pole by air. had said he would

try to fly to France; Chamberlin, an able civilian pilot, was an entrant; on the other side of the Atlantic some of the daring French war aces were making ready. But Lindbergh went on preparing quietly.

Suddenly it was announced that he was leaving San Diego, California, for New York to take off. He flew like a meteor, crossed the Continent in record time, and landed at the Curtiss field in his Ryan monoplane. And on a wet, grey Friday morning, the 20th of the month, he rose from a sodden field, and started for Paris. “So long,” he said, a- though he were stepping into a motor-car. The heavy plane lumbered forward in the mud.

It seem that it could not get up in time. Commander Byrd, standing in front of his big machine, and others near the end of the run way, looked on in fearful fascination, for the boy had to do it or die. At the last moment the plane rose; above a distant line of trees its burnished wings dipped and were gone. On he flew, away over Newfoundland, over icebergs floating about, and on all night over the broad Atlantic,

to Ireland, across the English Channel, and on to the great air station at Le Bourget, to receive one of the greatest welcomes ever accorded a man. All the world has since acclaimed, as that great host of French people did, this marvellous air adventure, the greatest triumph ever won by an American abroad. He flew 3,639 uiles in 33i hours.

Flyers Make History

The second trans-ocean flight within a fortnight was successfully accomplished in the 40 hours between Saturday morning, June 4, and Sunday evening, June 5, when the Bellanca plane Columbia, with Clarence Cham berlin as pilot, and Charles Levine, owner of the plane as passenger, completed a successful non-'stop “hop” from Roosevelt field. Long Island, to Helfta, a suburb of Eisleben, Germany, 110 miles south-west of Berlin. They flew 3,923 miles in 42J hours It had been intended by them to fly

back to America, but the airmen “fell out.” Chamberlin took an early boat back to the States; Levine, who knew very little about an airplane, stayed awhile in Europe, and startled the people with a reckless hop from Paris to Croydon, in which his life was more in danger than ever it had been in Chamberlin’s capable hands when the monoplane was crossing the Atlantic.

Commander Byrd made history with his flight on June 29 and July 1, 1927, from New York to France. It was a terrible journey, and after floating about above France in an inky darkness for a long time, the airmen were forced to make a landing in the sea at Ver-sur-Mer, on the French coast. They flew 3,600 miles in 42 hours. The Atlantic has been flown only once from east to west; In April last Major J. Fitzmaurice, of the Irish Free State Air Force, Herr Koehl, and Baron Gunther von Huenefeld, flew from Ireland to the west. They had a hazardous journey, being forced far to the north; but they landed at Greenley Island, on the Labrador coast, a bleak and icy place. Later, relief planes were sent to them, and they reached the mainland. Theirs was an important flight for many had failed, and many doubted whether an East to West crossing was possible.

The Atlantic was crossed again only a few weeks ago, when the monoplane Friendship carried from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, to Llan-

elly, Wales, the first woman ever to cross the ocean by plane, Miss Amelia Earhart. a Boston sodiety girl. And only a few days ago another air record was created when two Italians. Captain Arturo Ferrarin and Major Carlo Delprete, flew from Rome across the Atlantic to Brazil without a stop—--4,632.86 miles in 51 hours.

Conquest of Pacific

A month before the tragedy of the Dole Prize race to Honolulu, two American airmen. Lieutenant Lester Maitland and Lieutenant Albert Hegenberger, had successfully completed the first non-stop flight across flie Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, a distance of 2,390 miles. It was an uneventful but important feat. They reached Hawaii in 23 hours. Now the compass-needle of world interest, which has oscillated for so long between one side of the Atlantic and the other, has been swung sharply south toward Australia and -New Zealand by the magnificent flight of Squadron-Leader Kingsford Smith and his companions, who tackled and accomplished what was

acclaimed the most ambitious flight over ocean ever undertaken. The feat is too fresh in the mind of the world to warrant lengthy recall; but its significance can briefly be sketched. The airmen left Oakland, Honolulu, in the big Southern Cross plane on Thursday, May 31, and zoomed out over the Pacific. The brief space of 27 hours 27 minutes found them in sunny Hawaii, 2,400 miles away, wreathed with triumph and with leis. They left Hawaii on the Sunday for Suva. From there on, the airmen saw a sight as new to the eye of man as that which filled the eye of stout Cortes (or was it Balboa?) when, with eagle glance, he took in the broad ocean from that famed Darien peak—they were the first ever tc see those long, blue leagues of the Pacific from the air. Suva welcomed them 34i hours after their departure from Hcwaii. On the Friday afternoon they left Fiji, and riding against

a howling storm that swung the plane about like a feather, reached Brisbane, 26 hours 29 minutes later. Their actual flying time from California had been SS hours 11 minutes. Australia almost went mad, as she well might do. She was welcoming home two of her sons, who had returned in a blaze of fame. The flight was unique in another way. In no other venture has radio

New Zealand will soon welcome Squadron-Leader Smith and FlightLieutenant Ulm, when they cross the Tasman on the next leg of the worldflight which they now contemplate. But the brave Americans who accompanied them have gone home. The flight will do much to awaken in New Zealand an air sense, which she has been without heretofore.

science been brought so much into play. Almost throughout the journey the Southern Cross was talking with the world. As it sped through the sky, with only horizon to horizon of ocean waste beneath, its crew kept up a running fire of messages. It was possible almost to learn what the airmen were thinking in those lonely, hazardous hours. They were graphic messages, too, revealing in a snapshot flash what the flyers were seeing—the wrinkled sea far below, the shadow of the plane in the moonlight, flung on the fleecy clouds above which she had mounted, the golden sunshine of some tropic dawn, again the Stygian blackness of a stormy night. “LINDY,” AMERICA’S IDOL — CoI. Charles Lindbergh , by his lone Atlantic flight , achieved the greatest triumph ever icon by an American abroad.

Death and Romance But the story of these ocean flights is not one long trumpeting of triumph; for air and sea are full of death as well as romance. The English Channel is the grave of bold airmen of earlier days. In the grey Atlantic sleep others of the pioneers—great airmen like Charles Nungesser (decorated 39 times for his exploits), some of Britain’s finest flyers, an adventurous princess, and a peer’s daughter. The blue Pacific holds the secret of the fate of those who failed and perished in the tragic Dole Prize race last August, from California to Honolulu. A girl was with them, too. In the morning sunshine they flew gaily over the Golden Gate and sped out to sea. Something went wrong. Bike hapless Icarus they fell from high into the cold arms of Ocean, and again only the wild cry of some far-questing sea-fowl disturbed the Pacific’s eternal song, the only requiem of these courageous souls.

Somewhere in the Tasman Sea lie Lieutenant Moncrieff and Captain Hood, whose brave but ill-prepared attempt to reach New Zealand from Australia at the end of last year ended in tragedy. And disaster has followed flyers over frozen northern wastes, as with General Nobile and his companions, cast away with death at hand in a land of ice and snow. Yet where there is pioneering there must ever be sacrifice, and those who have died have not died in vain. They may have been dreamers who discerned, beyond the dangers, a day when man would ride the air with the same confidence as now he does the sea—a day of winged commerce and travel, when all the earth will he compassed about with routes through the sky. And who will say. after scanning the recent advance of aviation, that that day is not at hand?